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Schadenfreude (; ; "harm-joy") is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a loanword from German. The closest word in English would be gloat. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing "inequity aversion".
Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with lower self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.
It is hypothesized that this inverse relationship is mediated through the human psychological inclination to define and protect their self- and in-group- identity or self-conception. Specifically, for someone with high self-esteem, seeing another person fail may still bring them a small (but effectively negligible) surge of confidence because the observer's high self-esteem significantly lowers the threat they believe the visibly-failing human poses to their status or identity. Since this confident individual perceives that, regardless of circumstances, the successes and failures of the other person will have little impact on their own status or well-being, they have very little emotional investment in how the other person fares, be it positive or negative.
Conversely, for someone with low self-esteem, someone who is more successful poses a threat to their sense of self, and seeing this person fall can be a source of comfort because they perceive a relative improvement in their internal or in-group standing.
Epicaricacy is a seldom-used direct equivalent, borrowed from Greek language epichairekakia (ἐπιχαιρεκακία, first attested in AristotleLiddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon s.v. ) from ἐπί epi 'upon', χαρά chara 'joy', and κακόν kakon 'evil'.
Tall poppy syndrome is a cultural phenomenon where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticized because they have been classified as better than their peers. This is similar to "begrudgery", the resentment or envy of the success of a peer. If someone were to feel joy by the victim's fall from grace, they would be experiencing schadenfreude.
Roman holiday is a metaphor from Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, where a gladiator in ancient Rome expects to be "butchered to make a Roman holiday" while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.
Morose pleasure (), meaning "the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts", definition of morose delectation , Oxford English Dictionary was considered by the medieval church to be a sin. Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 74 , The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, Second and Revised Edition, 1920; Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Online Edition Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Knight. Chapter 6 Proposing the Story of the World , Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth, Basic Books, 2006. France writer Pierre Klossowski maintained that the appeal of Sadomasochism is morose delectation. Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism: Bataille / Klossowski/ Foucault , Jones Irwin, ISSN 1393-614X Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy Vol. 10 2006.Klossowski, Pierre. 1991. Sade, My Neighbour, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Illinois. Northwestern University Press.
"Gloating" is an English word of similar meaning, where "gloat" means "to observe or think about something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight" (e.g., to gloat over an enemy's misfortune). .
Displeasure at another's happiness is involved in envy, and perhaps in jealousy. The pseudo-German coinage "freudenschade" similarly means sorrow at another's success. The correct form would be Freudenschaden, since the pseudo-German coinage incorrectly assumes the n in Schadenfreude to be an interfix and the adjective schade]] ("unfortunate") a noun.
Displeasure at another's good fortune is Gluckschmerz, a pseudo-German word coined in 1985 as a joke by the pseudonymous Wanda Tinasky; the correct German form would be Glücksschmerz. (2026). 9780375503382, Random House. ISBN 9780375503382 It has since been used in academic contexts.
Displeasure at another's unhappiness is sympathy, pity, or compassion.
Sadism gives pleasure through the infliction of pain, whereas schadenfreude is pleasure on observing misfortune and in particular, the fact that the other somehow deserved the misfortune. (2026). 9781107017504, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107017504
In East Asia, the emotion of feeling joy from seeing the hardship of others was described as early as late 4th century BCE. The phrase Xing zai le huo (幸災樂禍]]) first appeared separately as xing zai (幸災), meaning the feeling of joy from seeing the hardship of others, and le huo (樂禍), meaning the happiness derived from the unfortunate situation of others, in the ancient Chinese text Zuo zhuan (左傳]]). The chengyu xing zai le huo (幸災樂禍]]) is still used among Chinese speakers.
In Japanese, the saying exemplifies schadenfreude.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle used epikhairekakia (ἐπιχαιρεκακία in Greek) as part of a triad of terms, in which epikhairekakia stands as the opposite of phthonos (φθόνος), and Archenemy (νέμεσις) occupies the mean. Nemesis is "a painful response to another's undeserved good fortune", while phthonos is a painful response to any good fortune of another, deserved or not. The epikhairekakos (ἐπιχαιρέκακος) person takes pleasure in another's ill fortune.
Lucretius characterises the emotion in an extended simile in De rerum natura: Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem, "It is pleasant to watch from the land the great struggle of someone else in a sea rendered great by turbulent winds." The abbreviated Latin tag suave mare magno recalled the passage to generations familiar with the Latin classics.Patrick O'Brian's usage of the tag in his Aubrey-Maturin historical novels is reflected in Dean King's companion lexicon A Sea of Words (3rd ed.2000).
Caesarius of Heisterbach regards "delight in the adversity of a neighbour" as one of the "daughters of envy... which follows anger" in his Dialogue on Miracles. Dialogus miraculorum, IV, 23.
During the seventeenth century, Robert Burton wrote:
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer mentioned schadenfreude as the most evil sin of human feeling, famously saying "To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is diabolic."
The song "Schadenfreude" in the musical Avenue Q, is a comedic exploration of the general public's relationship with the emotion.
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People describes schadenfreude as a universal, even wholesome reaction that cannot be helped. "There is a German psychological term, Schadenfreude, which refers to the embarrassing reaction of relief we feel when something bad happens to someone else instead of to us." He gives examples and writes, "People don't wish their friends ill, but they can't help feeling an embarrassing spasm of gratitude that the happened to someone else and not to them." (2026). 9781400034727, Anchor Books. ISBN 9781400034727
Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003, is a study of the issue of how the pain and misfortune of some people affects others, namely whether war photography and War art may be helpful as anti-war tools, or whether they only serve some sense of schadenfreude in some viewers.
Philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno defined schadenfreude as "... largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another, which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate."Cited in
WordGenius.com August 13, 2019
A 2003 study examined intergroup schadenfreude within the context of Sports Rivalries, specifically an international football (soccer) competition. The study focused on the German and Dutch football teams and their fans. The results of this study indicated that the emotion of schadenfreude is very sensitive to circumstances that make it more or less legitimate to feel such malicious pleasure toward a sports rival.
A 2011 study by Cikara and colleagues using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined schadenfreude among Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees fans, and found that fans showed increased activation in brain areas correlated with self-reported pleasure (ventral striatum) when observing the rival team experience a negative outcome (e.g., a strikeout). By contrast, fans exhibited increased activation in the anterior cingulate and insula when viewing their own team experience a negative outcome.
A 2006 experiment about "justice served" suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing "bad people" suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects observed via fMRI see someone experiencing physical pain. Researchers expected that the brain's empathy center of subjects would show more stimulation when those seen as "good" got an electric shock, than would occur if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider "bad". This was indeed the case, but for male subjects, the brain's pleasure centers also lit up when someone got a shock that the male thought was "well-deserved". For a lay summary, see
Brain-scanning studies show that schadenfreude is correlated with envy in subjects. Strong feelings of envy activated physical pain nodes in the brain's dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; the brain's reward centers, such as the ventral striatum, were activated by news that other people who were envied had suffered misfortune. The magnitude of the brain's schadenfreude response could even be predicted from the strength of the previous envy response.
A study conducted in 2009 provides evidence for people's capacity to feel schadenfreude in response to negative events in politics. The study was designed to determine whether or not there was a possibility that events containing objective misfortunes might produce schadenfreude. It was reported in the study that the likelihood of experiencing feelings of schadenfreude depends upon whether an individual's own party or the opposing party is suffering harm. This study suggests that the domain of politics is prime territory for feelings of schadenfreude, especially for those who identify strongly with their political party.
In 2014, research in the form of an online survey analyzed the relationship between schadenfreude and 'Dark Triad' traits (i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). The findings showed that those respondents who had higher levels of Dark Triad traits also had higher levels of schadenfreude, engaged in greater anti-social activities, and had greater interests in sensationalism.
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